Mobile devices, such as mobile phones, tablets, MP3 players, personal digital assistants, laptop computers, etc. have come to play a significant role in modern life. Unfortunately, the mobility that makes these devices so useful also makes them prone to loss and theft.
Various techniques have been developed to help recover mobile devices that have been lost or stolen (“missing devices”). For example, some mobile devices have the ability to obtain and communicate their current location. This ability has been leveraged to allow other devices to request the current location of missing devices. Specifically, using one device, a user may send a request to a service to find the location of a missing device. In response to the request, the service sends a request to the missing device to obtain the current location of the missing device. Assuming that the missing device is on and reachable by the service, the missing device communicates its current location to the service. The service then communicates the location information to the requesting device. The requesting device may, for example, display the current location of the missing device on a map. The user may then use the location information to hunt down the missing device.
Unfortunately, the value of such services is diminished by the fact that thieves can prevent the devices they steal from communicating with such services by immediately powering down the devices. If a thief is able to power down a device before the owner is able to send a request to the device locator service, then the owner will be unable to locate the missing device.
Various techniques may be used to prevent thieves from powering down the devices they steal. For example, a mobile device may be designed to power down only after a password has been provided. Assuming that the thief does not know the power-down password, the owner of a stolen device will be able to query the location of the stolen device until the device becomes disabled. The device may become disabled in a variety of ways, such as running out of battery life, being shielded from wireless communications, or being partially or completely destroyed.
Assuming that the owner of a missing device is able to quickly become aware that the device is missing, the additional time that a power-down password affords the owner may be enough for the owner to query the location of the device before the device becomes disabled. However, owners do not always become aware of their missing devices right away. Therefore, it is desirable to provide techniques for recovering mobile devices that may help both in situations where owners quickly become aware of missing devices, and situations in which they do not.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.